I've been running a pool of 5 x 2TB Seagates for the last couple of years (WHS2011, Dashboard add-in, latest version). This has been working ok, until I had a predictive failure warning on one of the drives. I removed the drive from the pool, and replaced the Seagate with WD Red 2TB NAS drive. This added back into the pool fine, and all was good.
About a week ago, another Seagate started reporting SMART errors (I also run Scanner), so I planned to replace this too, but this time I bought a WD Red 3TB NAS Drive. I removed the failing drive again, and installed the new 3TB drive. It was detected ok, although initially it appeared as an MBR drive (odd), and scanner just showed it as 'Disk Drive', and not the proper device name, but the re-balance started anyway. During the re-balance though, the drive dropped out of the pool. No errors as such, but it did. I rebooted the server, and it appeared in the pool again. I restarted the re-balance, but it dropped out again. I then tried removing the drive from the pool, which I eventually did after some effort, and did some tests on the drive. First, I wiped it, then initialized it as a GPT drive, then I added it back into the pool. Again, it appeared ok, this time with the proper device name, and I tried re-balancing again. This time, the whole server pretty much locked up during this process, and it took me a few hours to get it stable again. The 3TB drive is still connected, but not part of the pool. I've run various tests on it, and all complete ok with no errors.
So, I don't really know what the problem is. I know there's a 2TB limit in WHS2011 for each volume, but I didn't think this applied to DrivePool. It could be a faulty disk, in which case I'll have to get it replaced, but it does look ok from the tests I've done.
Anyone have any thoughts?